Someone messaged me a while back to say they hadn't listened to one of my songs in two years, but the second it came on in a taxi they were back on a beach in Durban at seventeen, completely unprepared for how hard it hit them. That message has stayed with me longer than most reviews ever have.

I used to think my job was to make something that sounded good. The longer I do this, the more I think my actual job is to leave enough space in a song for someone else's life to move in — a gap in the lyric, a held note, a verse that doesn't explain too much. The music is just the frame. The memory is what fills it.

That's part of why the Memory Archive exists on this site. I don't want to be precious about what these songs mean. I'd rather hear what they actually became for the people who carried them somewhere I never went.